Nā Te Tumu Whakarae | Chief Executive update
Kia ora koutou.
November is a month for celebration, with our three annual Research Honours Aotearoa award events happening on consecutive weeks throughout the month.
As I write this, we have just returned from the awards event in Auckland at which ten amazing people were honoured for their work in fields as diverse as mathematics and radio astronomy to religious fundamentalism in Japan and audio portraiture of wāhine Māori.
In Dunedin last week we celebrated five awardees from equally diverse subject disciplines, and next week in Wellington we will complete the event series with medals and awards to the final group in 2024, including the award of our prestigious Rutherford Medal.
Please look at the Research Honours Aotearoa section on our website where more details of the award recipients and their research can be found.
Celebrations of this kind are an important reminder of the truly outstanding research that is being conducted in Aotearoa New Zealand. Alongside excellence, they also draw attention to the opportunity and power inherent in diversity – of knowledge and thought, and of people and place.
We as a Society are blessed with the opportunity of having a very broad membership family that encompasses this diversity. To be able to bring together expertise from so many perspectives to consider some of the many issues facing humanity is a very powerful attribute and one we seek to use to even greater effect in coming years. One such initiative currently under development is to provide a web series of ‘perspectives’ on key topics where readers can hear a number of expert views on the same topic approached through different lenses, such as different disciplines. More on this to come shortly.
In the meantime, and staying with the subject of celebration, I wish you all a very happy festive season and look forward to connecting again through this newsletter in 2025!
Ngā mihi nui,
Paul Atkins MRSNZ
Chief Executive
Royal Society Te Apārangi